How many schools should we add to our list in quest of merit aid?

<p>garland: I would think that insurance companies would be scared that an temporarily unlicensed college kid would occasionally get behind the wheel -- either forgetting that he is currently uninsured or just "taking a one-time risk".</p>

<p>Lgreen - go to the Dartmouth College website, and use their calculator to see what they say your EFC at Dartmouth would be. If it truly is only $12000, and you can even scrape up $8K yearly, then she may well be better off with the need-blind 100% of need schools - especially the truly wealthy ones - Swat, Ivies, etc. Between work-study, summer job and loans, she might be able to emerge from school with no more than $20-25000 in debt. Now that is a lot, especially for a musician, but I think it would be a good bet for her to make, that she would be able to pay off that amount of loan in exchange for a top-notch education.</p>

<p>I'm not at all an FA expert, but I think the 100% need schools vary widely in how they treat assets such as mortgaged rental property. If all your income was a salary of $60K, and you had no assets - big house mortgage,etc., then i think you get a low EFC, but I know several parents have posted here with 80K and less incomes, and rental property, that have big EFCs. You may be sitting right on the cusp where it just depends what deal you can get - there is no obvious advantage to going merit vs state vs 100% need, you have to wait until you get actual FA offers.
To give you some perspective - others chime in - but I think most of the people on this forum who are aggressively looking for merit are families with 20-30K EFCs and up, who can't afford to paythat much each year. People looking to borrow 20K+ per YEAR to meet EFC.
Only the Ivies and AWSs come down to meet you so to speak, if the family can meet even 70-80% of EFC, they will cap the student loan portion in the student's name, leaving you to borrow 20-30% of EFC, plus cover work-study and student loan amount - which in the long run may make more sense than a 3/4 tuition merit scholarship.</p>

<p>jlauer-If the insurance company lets you take the kid off the policy, they are not covered during that time period, period. If they then choose to drive without insurance, it is the kid and parents who should be scared.</p>

<p>We were able to do this with our old insurance. We would take S off when he was at school and call and add him anytime he was here. Our new ins. co. allows a discount for kids attending school over 100 miles from home without a car. Rules vary from state to state and company to company. Everyone should check the specifics of their own policy.</p>

<p>Hi;
I havnt read this full thread, but I wanted to add USC (University of Southern California) as a suggestion for merit aid for academically strong students, if its not in here already.<br>
My d scored 34 on ACT, with a 2160 on the SAT and 780 on Math 2c 740 on physics, and she just received her acceptance from USC last week, with an offer to fly her out to be interviewed for the Presidential Scholarship--- a $64,000 half tuition. (The Trustees scholarship is Full tuition...)</p>

<p>Apparently they (USC) have about 200 of these half tuition scholarships every year. Plus you get the California sun and all the course offerings of a big university, although I hear from some that the neighborhood is not the safest.....</p>

<p>Anyway, to all here---good luck in your quests for merit $$$$....</p>

<p>lgreen, I look at it this way. Figure your college budget without regard to the savings you MIGHT have in the child is away (except car expenses, deduct those). She'll still get haircuts, still want clothes, still need personal items. </p>

<p>I never care a whit about what the school says my kid will spend on personal items or transportation to and from school-I calculate that myself and add it to R+B, Tuition and fees "direct costs" in their parlance. Watch out for "optional fees". </p>

<p>If your EFC is calculated by a 100% of need college to be $12,000 it is likely that the need will be met at a $40,000 COA school by a grant of $22-23,000, and $5-6K of self help (meaning loans and work study).Meaning your labor and your D's labor is ultimately responsible for $17 to $18k at the most generous of schools (there are few).</p>

<p>Merit aid does nothing to change those numbers at those schools. Merit comes off of the grant. Sorry. </p>

<p>There are schools that preferentially package their need based aid for their merit recipients. These are VERY difficult to find. Sometimes the info is only mentioned face to face. What this means is that when your kid is top of the mark at a 100% of need school/merit granting school AND qualifies for need based aid beyond the merit award, they will SOMETIMES and FOR SOME KIDS change the financial award structure to where there is zero self help component. I have seen it happen twice. So for example: A COA of $45-$20=$25 left to pay but an EFC of $12. The remaining $13k is all grants , no loans, no work study. Which means to those willing to borrow a modest amount, that becomes the equivalent of a $7k efc, effectively bumping the merit scholarship to $25k. Additionally some schools that are Profile schools will revert to Fafsa for their scholarship kids. Wierd, yes-but it happens.</p>

<p>Some will also argue that the same result can be achieved at schools not pledging to meet 100% of need because they routinely preferentially package their awards. Still others will argue that certain need only schools preferentially package their need only awards , too based on how much they want the kid.</p>

<p>Mind-blowing , isn't it? </p>

<p>It seems to me you should spend more time looking at those schools that have several full tuition or at the least 3/4 tuition scholarships where your child will be competitive in THAT MERIT APPLICANT pool. </p>

<p>I know nothing about specific programs and these schools are probably too limited (although they would be fine for my D) and I doubt if "harp" is there. Off the top of my head (and my memory ain't great) Albertson College in Idaho looks pretty good. Carroll in Montana. Westminster in Missouri. All are schools (small to tiny LAC's) we considered. I really like Westminster and a significant part of me would prefer a school like that for my D. Pretty. Safe. Small. Moderate politically. Other than that the auto-merit route at one of the guaranteed merit schools like TCNJ may be your best shot.</p>

<p>Oh, yeah. What cangel said, too. LOL. We are also playing that card. LOL.</p>

<p>It's important to look at GPA requirements when considering merit aid offers. College can be a big adjustment and students may not find it quite as easy to keep the grades they had in high school.</p>

<p>St. Olaf was mentioned a couple of pages ago. I'm very interested in this school, but I don't think they offer full tuition merit aid. They do have $7500 for NMF and some nice partial tuition awards. What I haven't been able to figure out from their website is how many partial tuition awards they give out. It makes a big difference if the pool of applicants is competing for two, ten, or fifty awards and so on.</p>

<p>eta...To the OP, I'd take a good look at The College of New Jersey. I know they have a harp ensemble and a lot of smart kids who decided the merit money was too good to give up. Another school to look at might be Rider University, also in suburban NJ. They absorbed Westminster Choir College in Princeton as their music college. The overall academics there would be lower than TCNJ but I do know someone who has been happy there on a full scholarship.</p>

<p>At 100% of need schools, merit aid often simply becomes part of the total offered package. For my d., the merit aid eliminated the need for loans (at several schools), but didn't change the total amount of the package one way or the other. In other words, the "preferential packaging" 'Mudge describes. (Similar things happened at schools that claimed not to offer any "merit aid" - from our perspective, it was ALL merit aid.) The point being that merit aid is often used to attract students at the higher end of the income spectrum away from what are said to be "better" schools, but may have little impact on the aid received by middle or lower income students.</p>

<p>mini , I don't think we are disagreeing but just so everyone else is clear. If my D's FA package is $20K but has a loan component in it of a subsidized Stafford, when school B offers a package without a loan component, AND I plan on taking a loan in addition to the package offered up to the unsub Stafford level, that effectively creates a FA package $2625.00 greater than school A. Does it not?</p>

<p>We agree - that's the way I see it. What matters is NOT the size of the package, nor whether the aid is merit- or need-based, nor even in some cases how much of it is made up of loans, but what you and your offspring is expected to pay - now (in the form of tuition) and in the future (in the form of loans).</p>

<p>just reading today but I wanted to thank all the CC parents that are sharing very helpful information in this topic .</p>

<p>So the gist is: How much "out of pocket" will my kid's education cost me (now and after repayment of any loans) after various sources of money are exhausted: merit, fc, work-study, etc.</p>

<p>Is that the point? Or is there more? (My head is spinning, I could never be an accountant.)</p>

<p>You got it! A $120,000 scholarship is GREAT, but if the school costs $200k to attend, you are still paying more than most state schools, and if you don't have it, you don't have it.</p>

<p>Therefore, if "out of pocket" is an issue and unless your state schools do not offer quality programs and you can't get OOS waived in another state, then you need to go to your own state school.</p>

<p>So, short of the widely-reported newish efforts by Princeton, Stanford, Yale and Harvard, which schools are on the generous side as far as grants vs. loans, work-study, etc.?</p>

<p>I have the impression that USC, WUStL and, indirectly, Rice offer the lowest effective cost to the students they really want (beyond a very small number of big deal scholarships). Is that right? Any others?</p>

<p>The point is - one can't tell without applying! The whole point of the enrollment management game, from the school's perspective, is how to attract the largest number of desired candidates at the lowest overall discount to the school, while at the same time meeting whatever mandates exist for economic and other forms of diversity. Such management can take place within schools that claim to offer only need-based aid, or those that explicitly through merit into the mix. </p>

<p>Schools that have some of these "widely report" newish efforts also have low to very low percentages of Pell Grant students (those who would most benefit from these efforts.) That may change over time - we'll have to see. But some of those efforts, Princeton's perhaps being the best example, are aimed predominantly at not losing those students in the upper ranges of financial need ($100-$160k) who they felt might choose other schools offering merit grants rather than loans. Brown, in contrast (not better or worse, just different), doesn't waive loan requirements, but waives work-study requirements for at least the first year (as many poor students will work anyway, but now be able to send the money home.)</p>

<p>clayvessel -</p>

<p>USC is a good example of how a great merit scholarship may still be untenable: The USC website shows the cost of attendance (for 2006-07) to be $44,582. Tuition is about $32K. So a half-tuition merit award would still leave about $28,500 to be paid.</p>

<p>"So a half-tuition merit award would still leave about $28,500 to be paid."</p>

<p>More in future years.</p>

<p>Eulenspiegel
As a follow up on your post, our experience has been very positive in regard to merit money at WashU. As an example, last year WashU awarded the following full or 1/2 tuition awards:
Danforth 16
Rodriguez 25
Ervin 30
In addition to the above, each year they award up to 3 full tuition + stipend awards in each of the following programs: Compton - 3; Mylonas - 3; Moog - 3; Lien - 3; Langsdorf - 4. There are 24 1/2 tuition Langsdorf awards. There is also a variety of other merit awards, a synopsis of which is listed on their website <a href="http://admissions.wustl.edu/admissions/ua.nsf/3rd%20Level%20Pages_Scholarships_scholarship_ataglace.htm?OpenPage&charset=iso-8859-1%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://admissions.wustl.edu/admissions/ua.nsf/3rd%20Level%20Pages_Scholarships_scholarship_ataglace.htm?OpenPage&charset=iso-8859-1&lt;/a> </p>

<p>They can be very generous to students that they really want - offering additional Grants and other assistance. These awards are based on an evaluation of the total student. While basic stats (SAT, GPA, etc.) are important, they are not the end all be all.</p>

<p>Back to the car insurance issue.... our insurer (Geico) charges NOTHING to keep a college student w/ license who is away at a college at least 150 miles away without at car, on the policy. So Dd is covered if she drives someone else's car, or drives during the summer or vacations - all for no charge. This was a change from their policy of a year or so ago. They used to charge even if your kid still only had a permit if he/she had it for longer than 6 months!<br>
As for other costs - The way we figured it, and the way it has worked out, is that the only costs you really need to look at are R&B and tuition and fees. Forget cost of attendance. You were already paying for food, books, trips, clothes, etc before kid moved away. You will have quite a bit of savings when he/she is gone (food, hot waters, shampoo, all those H.S. debate trips, etc.) which will offset the added expenses of your kid having to travel to and from school. Make your student responsible through summer and/or school year earnings for all books, and personal expenses. (It's amazing how frugal they can be!), and then the numbers are more manageable. If you really look at all the money you spend on your high school kid, you'll find that some of those costs in the COA budgets are not "added" costs and will not increase the financial burden. You have been paying them all along!<br>
I had no idea how we would pay for college when DD was looking. I had no idea how much we could squeeze out of the budget, and wasn't really sure how to figure it out. We had no college savings owing to the fact that we had lived on very limited budgets when the kids were little and only made a decent salary (household ad.j gross income of $88,500 according to taxes I just finished filing), for the last 5 years. We live fairly simply, and DD's school has used the FAFSA EFC (to the penny) for us the last two years. (We have very uncomplicated earnings and our only asset is some equity in our house.) We have been able to pay our EFC out-of-pocket - something that I NEVER thought we would be able to do. The only way I can figure that we manage is that the roof hasn't caved in yet (fingers crossed), the old cars keep running (fingers crossed), we don't have 16-year-old son driving yet, and don't plan to for a few years (savings of $3000 a year), there is a Hope tax credit/ or lifetime learning credit, and we are not spending money on DD that we normally would have had she lived at home. So be not afraid! The fact that all those colleges are filled with students means that somehow, people are able to afford sending their kids!
(Whoa. You are probably saying, "way too much financial info shared here!" But really, I want to let other people know that somehow it all works out! )</p>

<p>Wow, both MomOFour and me ( Mom of Four) are both posting on this thread!</p>

<p>Because D is accepted to UNC CHapel Hill and is applying to Duke and TCNJ, my family are planning to take a east coast college/vacation this spring break. . .</p>

<p>Planning to visit
1. UNC CHapel Hill (d accepted, no news of scholarships yet though),
2. Duke (not accepted yet, but will visit b/c if D goes to UNC, she will also be able to take classes at Duke)
3. TCNJ (D applying by next week, will get accepted with Full tuition, Room Board and laptop) -- d is interested in this college because it is in the east coast near NY. She loves the fine arts, theatre, etc. and
4. take a peek/ or at least walk by NYU</p>

<p>We have a 15 yr old sophomore (interested in NYU) and 13 yr old 8th grader(currently taking Algebra 2 at the local high school and getting a A, interested in Duke) and 11 year old 6th grader (taking Algebra 1) --so we are all going to scope out the colleges, AND visit Phila, Wash DC, and NY at the same time. </p>

<p>It will be pricey, but we can't have D decide on a college without visiting it first, so we consider the money to be put to good use (we figure by visiting them first hand, she will either love them or decide to go to college elsewhere). We are making plans to tour UNC and TCNJ ( and Duke--if we hear that she gets accepted by then) extensively--eg talk to admissions, sit in classes, visit the dorms, etc.</p>